


Passenger's Missing

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: (ambiguous tag for spoilery reasons), Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Feelings Realization, Possible Character Death, Post Page 655, Rash Illness (Stand Still Stay Silent), The Serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-07
Packaged: 2018-09-15 13:16:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9236729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: When Tuuri is infected and bound to die, Sigrun must find ways to cope with both the impending loss and the realization of her feelings.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



> Hi! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write for you. I loved your letter and the prompts, and I hope this (which got so much longer than I had planned) is somewhere close to what you imagined. The song that accompanied me through a lot of the writing process, inspired the title, provided the little excerpt at the beginning and strongly influenced the final scene is Vienna Teng's [Recessional](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGKicxfFtsw).

_Fluorescent announcements beat their wings overhead:_  
_"Passenger's missing, we're looking for you."_  
  
_And she dreams through the noise, her weight against me…_  
  


* * *

_  
_ "There was a troll - under the tank," Tuuri said. Her voice was toneless, and by then she'd started shaking. "It came through the floor. It got me."

Tuuri took her hand away, held up the red-stained glove.

A gouge in her shoulder was showing through the ripped fabric. With anybody at home, Sigrun would have laughed it away as a scratch, sent them to the medics to slap a bandage on, told them to make it an early night and expected them back on her team the next morning. The morning after that, if it was really bad.

She held herself to the same standards, didn't she? She'd been spoiling to go the morning after the flat troll had chewed up her arm. But Tuuri, whose knees buckled and pitched her forward into Sigrun's arms, barely catching herself before she tipped into the hole through the floor? Wouldn't be going anywhere anymore, ever again.

"You're dead, Fuzzy-Head," Sigrun heard someone say as she hoisted Tuuri up and helped her back onto the bed. "But the gods sent us a - how come you're dead?"

Tuuri's large, round eyes never left her face.

Not even the hole in the floor - or the dead troll, the slithering one, it was the slithering one - mattered so much in the end. "Stay here. Let Mikkel do his medic thing, and then tell me what I can do. We'll find a way to keep you alive."

But when she left the tank again to let Mikkel work, that thought was being consumed in a white-hot roar of anger.  
  


* * *

  
Morning broke with a blank slate of sky, and smoke rising grey into it.

What could be said for it, finally, was that Tuuri took it better than Sigrun herself could. Not morning coming and throwing its light onto the devastated field where they'd made their stand; that went by mostly unremarked-on as Sigrun and Emil made a round to finish off any trolls that had survived at the edge of the fire and lay struggling in the burned grass and the daylight. One of their ilk had killed Tuuri, but it didn't mean they had to suffer any more than necessary.

Sigrun remembered that lesson from when she'd still been small enough to curl up in her mom's lap. It was why she hadn't stuck with seafaring. The lesson had been that there was no honour, or even any point, to cruelty. Even if you were fighting for your life by any means necessary as they were every day, Sigrun's mom had said. _Especially_ then. You could enjoy the fight, but if you became crueller than you had to be, then you weren't any different from the trolls.

Fate, or their gods, or whatever it was that directed their lives, wasn't any better than a troll, either. Sigrun told Emil as much, and took her finger off the trigger as another thing twitched under her boot. If she drove her heel into its head a little harder than she had to, then surely no one could fault her.

She was saving bullets.

"Sigrun. Sigrun!" Emil's hand on her shoulder pulled her backward. Something clung to her foot, making her footing unsteady, and she looked down to find her boot coated in blood and bone splinters from the ruin that'd been the now-dead troll's head, and met Emil's white face pushing into view next to her. He said nothing else, shouldered his rifle and went to the next shadow in the scorched grass, kicking at the ground as he walked.

It wasn't fair.

It wasn't fair that once the first shock was over, that after Mikkel had examined Tuuri's shoulder, cleaned and bandaged the wound and given her something for the pain, she hadn't wasted time and instead taken a torch to look at the damage to the tank's undercarriage to see if the rest of them would have any chance of making the rendezvous-point in time, stammering only about how she couldn't _think_ about what'd happened just then.

It wasn't fair that Mikkel had quietly stated that whenever Tuuri was ready, he would be. How they both could be so quiet about it - it just didn't work that way, not as she was concerned.

Sigrun could feel the pull of utter exhaustion behind her eyes. It was a familiar feeling, after all-night hunts, or waking up after a long night spent drinking. Jamming the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw starbursts usually helped her get a hold on herself and wake up, but this time it wasn't going away.

Worse still, she could see Tuuri crawl from under the tank that moment, wince and clutch her shoulder before wandering in Sigrun's direction. Some force of habit or some wild optimism had her still wearing her mask.

"Hey. Can we talk?" Tuuri stuck her hands into her pockets, stood a distance from the dead troll and eyed it with trepidation before finally lifting her eyes to Sigrun. Old habits died hard, it seemed. Only Tuuri's eyes hadn't stopped being so damn wide and round and scared.

"Sure. Can't deny you anything now, can I?"

Tuuri shrugged, and for someone who was looking death in the eye she sounded almost bright, almost normal. "It's just… when I'm… there's a lot broken down there, but lots of it is frills, almost nothing vital you need for driving, and it doesn't matter you won't have light or heating when you reach the outpost, it'll just be a little inconvenient until then. The radio's the worst; I think I can get the rest working again. Before it gets dark today, if you take me to a garage so I can find tools and maybe some spare parts that haven't rusted away. If books can hold up then metal can, too. And then we need a driver. That should be you. I'll teach you. And out here you can drive into ditches and break things all you like, nobody's going to mind."

Sigrun turned away to suck in a deep breath. Her chest was a huge, hurting knot suddenly.

"Yeah, okay, we'll do that. I'll drive them home."  
  


* * *

  
"... and Onni never really let me go about my own business, though I… shouldn't really talk like that about him now. But he _did_ send Lalli to spy on me and my girlfriend, and of course it didn't matter where we went inside Keuruu; when he wasn't sleeping Lalli would always find us. So that's… something else I never really got to do," Tuuri said with a wet laugh as she reached metal parts and coils of wire Sigrun couldn't even name from a storage closet. "And any time he tried to tell me and Lalli things about sex, he'd go all flustered. It was so funny. That part, not controlling us."

Sigrun stuffed the parts into the bags she'd brought; they were beginning to cut into her shoulder with weight, but she really couldn't complain about her shoulder when she could still see the ripped uniform where Tuuri's blood had crusted. Mikkel hadn't washed or mended it.

"Huh. Your brother sounds like a worrywart. One of my cousins is like that, but her kid's still too small to do love things, she's not even left school yet. She wants to be a Cleanser when she grows up."

"Tell her about me when you get back home, okay?" Tuuri said. "About how you shouldn't do that to your kid. It'll just make them sneak around and do something that'll end badly. I guess I'll be a good morale tale. That's something, right?"

"You shouldn't be." Sigrun bagged another spare part. "And except if you want to build a whole new tank out of all of this, we should get going so you still have time for fixing things and don't get eaten for real when it gets dark."

Tuuri went almost at once, long strides for her stumpy legs, exited through the garage's gate into the light, a silhouette throwing a long shadow and looking back against the bright for a moment before she walked on and vanished into nothing at all.

Sigrun followed more slowly, out of the dim hall.  
  


* * *

  
The driver's seat was lumpy and uncomfortable under her ass.

Sigrun hated how wretched and helpless the whole thing made her feel, the tank wheezing to life unhappily when she turned the key in the ignition. A thin line of red from the sunset still clung to the dark trees; the sky still was blank and clear of clouds, a dark blue that was lighter at the edges, and only the evening star had come out yet. They weren't going to drive through the night - Sigrun still wouldn't allow that, she still had a duty to get the rest of her team home alive - just far enough to finally get off the damn battlefield.

Tuuri stood next to her; there wasn't really any other place for her to be. They'd banished the rest of the team into the barely-patched bunk room, after Mikkel had thrown out the troll and sprayed every last corner with decontaminant. He alsoinsisted that both Tuuri and Reynir wear their masks at all times, even though they'd quarantined Tuuri into the office and sealed the door as airtight as they could make it. The only way in and out for her now was through the driver's cabin, where Tuuri slept at night. Reynir they still could try to protect, even if that involved getting sprayed with more of the smelly stuff every time anyone came into that space. Sigrun started hating the smell, how it clung to everything, and how she couldn't get used to it.

"I talked to Lalli," Tuuri said. "He'll try learning more Swedish and as long as he can't speak it well enough, he'll be talking to Reynir in his dreams, so if you talk to Mikkel he can tell it to Reynir, and Reynir will pass on your message to Lalli," Tuuri said close to her ear. "And now drive past those trees there." Tuuri pointed ahead through the windshield. "There are roads on the other side you can follow around Odense to the rendezvous point. I'll mark it down in the maps for you, and Lalli will let you know if any of them are blocked and find you an alternate route."

It was almost normal, except for the fact that Tuuri was a dead woman walking. And didn't, couldn't make an end yet. It wasn't fair, all the things Tuuri was putting in order instead of making a proper goodbye. It wasn't fair that Sigrun hadn't been able to fight that troll, and, that Mikkel hadn't bothered to. Maybe Sigrun hadn't realized how much they'd needed Tuuri as part of the team. She was more integral than Sigrun could believe, as team members went. Next to her, Tuuri blinked her eyes when the tank began rumbling over the field.

"That's good. Don't jam your foot down on the gas too hard," she said, when the motor whined. "If you're nice to it it'll run just fine. And once you got it, you won't forget, either."

Sigrun let the tank shudder out, and reached for Tuuri. Her hand came to rest at the back of Tuuri's neck, with the mask's strap under her fingers, and her prickly short hair. No resistance from Tuuri when she rested her forehead against Sigrun's and closed her eyes. They shone with tears.

"This is the worst time, Sigrun," Tuuri murmured. " I-i can't even… nevermind. Sorry."

"I'm immune, Short Stuff," Sigrun said simply. "You can. It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter," Tuuri agreed. "Nothing does any more." She wrenched herself free of Sigrun's hold roughly, and was gone in an instant - only as far as the office, and it took Sigrun all her willpower to not go after her.  
  


* * *

  
Try as she might, Sigrun's driving never stopped sucking. The motor died on her, the tank stalled or jumped with no reason at all, and she almost spent more time yelling at it than driving. Three days in and barely halfway to the meetup point (not that the damage had done the tank's speed any favours), Sigrun was about ready to give up, borrow Emil's flame-thrower and set the whole thing on fire. They'd probably be faster on foot, and if they could carry as much as they'd need, she'd have done it in a heartbeat.

But they couldn't carry the stacks and stacks of books. Sigrun would have been happy to let them burn, but they were Tuuri's main interest on top of her research tasks. In the end Sigrun couldn't bring herself to torch them, not when they were going to get home without Tuuri.

Tuuri herself hadn't been back into the driver's cabin while Sigrun was there since that first evening. With nowhere except the office to go, Tuuri spent her time typing whole stacks of paper full of words so the clatter of the typewriter keys was an almost constant backdrop to Sigrun's stops and starts, and more often than not, part of the reason. Sometimes the typing would stop in time with them, and resume when the tank rolled on.

When he was not hovering around Tuuri to talk about the things they'd found, especially the useless garbage that was supposed to be a cure and that they seriously considered using, or trying to keep up with his other duties, Mikkel kept Sigrun company sometimes. Sigrun sometimes remembered to be furious with him for not being clearer about which trolls he had or hadn't killed - when she wasn't furious at herself and her arm for letting it happen at all. He bore it coldly without comment, and sometimes that even made it worse. A good fight would have made her feel a little better. At other times Emil hung around her, but neither of them talked much. Emil sat on the bench with his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms slung around them, and watched Sigrun try and drive when he wasn't nodding off - apparently the only time he caught any sleep at all, according to Mikkel.

He'd asked Reynir to teach him to pray, when he wasn't sleeping to try to find a way to cure Tuuri in the dreamworld, but the whole situation was crazy - Emil starting to believe, most of all. Sigrun would have laughed if she'd felt like it, remembering the panicked Icelandic shouting at the sky that one time that apparently counted as praying for Reynir, but she didn't much feel like teaching Emil the proper way either, _blót_ and all. If the gods - from either country - gave a damn, they sure weren't acting like it, not any longer. Perhaps the fire-eagle had been the goodbye sign of their protection.

Something still was to be said for them, though, Sigrun supposed, at least in terms of magic. Two nights past, just at the bounds of Odense near an old church on the outskirts of the city, Lalli and Reynir had banished the ghosts that still followed them. For good, they said, and that they'd had help from a dead Old World priest woman who'd taken the ghosts into her afterlife with her. Lalli had spent the rest of the night awake, sitting at the head of Tuuri's mattress on the floor, chanting in Finnish while his cousin slept.

And just how Tuuri kept soldiering on was a mystery to her.

She was the Captain. She'd failed in the worst way, but it was her duty to keep it together to keep the rest of her team together, no matter how, so she somehow found the resources. She had back then, too, after the ambush that killed two of her team in Norway. Somehow.

How Tuuri, who didn't have to, found the same sort of strength, Sigrun couldn't even begin to figure out.  
  


* * *

  
They'd made it to the sea, and Sigrun was alone in the driver's cabin.

They'd gone north-east steadily for five days, and washed up in a town that barely deserved to be called one by the name of Hasmark Strand. Sigrun had steered the tank over a low stone wall and plowed through a hedge of wild roses still clinging to their yellow leaves that'd grown up around the old houses, before the tank tipped forward down a sandy dune onto the beach, with the sea appearing like some sort of vision in front of her.

For a moment it took her breath away.

Sigrun had missed the sea. It still wasn't the right one; this wasn't a fjord, only a tame strait with no mountains in sight anywhere, and sheltered from the open ocean by Denmark's mainland. The way it rolled onto the beach with milky green-grey whitecaps under a deep grey sky was all wrong. But it was the sea at least, and so much better than any more soulless Danish horizon.

Sigrun was so absorbed in the view that she didn't notice Tuuri next to her until she spoke, and then she talked on in a way that didn't even leave Sigrun time to jump and swear.

"I'm done," Tuuri said, with an odd, flat finality to her urgent voice, like she was forcing out words she didn't want to say, and pulled the blanket she'd wrapped around herself closer. "I typed up all the research I'd had left so you have something to show for to the Nordic Council, and a log about how I'm feeling, and how it - maybe I'll be useful for Siv's research. I'd like that. I can't do anything, not really, but I can still be good for something. And there's an inventory list of the books you found for Torbjörn, and an assessment of their worth and condition, so he can go straight to the buyers, and you get your extra money quickly. Onni and Lalli can split mine."

Sigrun wanted to shake her for being so calm and going to her death so readily. That wasn't how it was done. She was at least supposed to put up a fight. Until it occurred to Sigrun that perhaps being calm was the whole fight. Tuuri of all people… she'd expected Tuuri to cry in a corner, and she'd worked like a mad person instead of breaking.

"And I had a thought, and I think… I-i'm ready."

Sigrun finally turned to look at her properly.

Tuuri's eyes were red, and sweat shone across her face, clinging in beads to her temples; she looked like she had a bad cold and nothing else, because Sigrun couldn't see any other sign of the Rash - she'd actually never seen it in person, only in pictures, since the entire point of everything was to keep people from getting infected, and where she came from that mostly worked. If it didn't, no one even wanted to hang on as long as Tuuri had except for quarantine if they had reason to believe it was a false alarm. She was just beginning to hope that maybe it might actually _be_ a false alarm.

Then Tuuri pulled down her black turtleneck to scratch the side of her throat, and Sigrun caught a glimpse of irritated skin - just a small patch, but definitely _there_ \- before the fabric snapped back into place.

"So that's what it looks like, huh?" she managed. Tuuri gave her a wide-eyed look - that hadn't changed, it still was the same look of fear and not-understanding as in the very beginning - and nodded. Sigrun swallowed past the lump in her throat.

"That's what it looks like. At least I guess you don't have to have any doubts now. I… I already talked to Lalli; he'll be able to lead me to rest as soon as I…"

"... yeah. Yeah, that's good. He knows how, right? You won't become a braindead ghost that tries to eat us. Though I wouldn't mind you eating me."

Tuuri's eyes filled with tears, and she gave Sigrun a wobbly smile that stung like someone had jabbed a needle into Sigrun's heart. "He knows how to fight me, if I turn into a stalker ghost, but I won't, I promise. I'll be good and go to Tuonela, th-that's all. I won't eat anybody, least of all you. I-it's not your fault. You didn't fail me. The sea's beautiful, isn't it?"

What to say to that? "You were on my crew and you're not coming home. I didn't protect you good enough." The other words, the explanations, the anger that came back, were all there on her tongue, but there was no way to say them aloud without upsetting Tuuri even more.

Tuuri gave her a stare even just for that, and looked out through the windshield. It'd started raining, and fat drops rolled down the other side of the glass. Her hands clenched around the dashboard, and Tuuri's shoulders went rigid, a frown showed on her face, as if she was working up the resolve for something else, on top of everything. Her mouth worked behind her mask for a moment before she spoke.

"If we are where I think we are it's less than ten kilometers until the rendezvous point, too, so you can stay on the beach the whole time until the outpost. It's an old castle and there's a forest around it all the way to the dunes, and they didn't cleanse the area for the reclamation attempt, Torbjörn said, before - before the radio broke, so you'll know when to head inland until you find it. And unless the sand clogs up the gears. I won't be around the fix that, m-maybe I should wait until… it'd only be until tomorrow or so, it won't make any difference… although Mikkel said I should do it early, so..."

"So it'll still make a difference to you, yeah. You're already getting worse, Fuzzy. You don't have to hang on." There was more behind those words, too. "I don't want to see you suffer. That's an order." They didn't come out like one, much as Sigrun would have liked to summon her battlefield voice and shout right at all gods and trolls and whatever else had made this happen. "Look at me, going soft at 32."

The air went out of Tuuri then. She dropped onto the passenger bench, clapped her hands over her face, and started crying.  
  


* * *

  
"I want to be outside when I do it. Wanting to get out of Keuruu got me here," Tuuri said, a long time after her tears had stopped.

They were sitting on the passenger bench together, and Tuuri had pillowed her head on Sigrun's shoulder, staring out into the driving rain. Although it wasn't long past midday, it might as well be dusk. "I don't care about the weather. If I catch a cold now… that's okay."

Sigrun snorted against her will. Her eyes still burned, and her knees still felt like rubber, but she was glad for Tuuri's presence in a way she'd never been before, never quite like that. She ran her fingers through Tuuri's hair again, as if that made anything better. There was a patch of bumpy skin behind Tuuri's ear as well, but she didn't care to check if that was what she thought it was, too. What else could it be?

She kept her hand in Tuuri's hair, anyway.

It figured, that she'd work it out too late. She'd never been great with feelings, at least not the ones that didn't let her go after them straight ahead and that needed figuring out instead.

"You won't, the cold germs are scared of you now. You've got the deadly boss germs, no one wants to mess with that."

Tuuri made a small noise in response that wasn't a laugh, not really. "Kisu doesn't either. She hissed at me yesterday, when I tried to hold her, and poofed up like I was a troll already," she answered, and her glimpse of humor was gone again. "She can probably tell. Smell it, or sense it, or something."

"Yeah, they can from the very start. I've seen it at home." She didn't feel like explaining the incidents. "But if she let you touch her up to now - she's a good kitten. She'll grow up into an A-grade cat, I can tell."

"I'd have liked to see that. And say goodbye to Onni. I miss him so much, I would have liked to talk to him, so it's not like Saimaa and I'm just suddenly gone, but Reynir says he's still recovering, and I couldn't fix the radio, so I wrote him a letter, so there's no point trying to wait until the ship comes if I could even make it that long, and… and…" she drew back from Sigrun's shoulder, sitting upright to look at her with a start. Sigrun held her gaze, even when her eyes were starting to burn, and her sight went blurry.

Funny.

She'd always been good at keeping in tears, when she'd had to deliver bad news, even when she'd felt like crying.

But she didn't have to kid herself any longer. There'd been people Sigrun knew had made it into her heart before. Most of the time it was _easy_ to make it there even if the other person was a hunter as well and it was only a matter of time until they didn't come home. But now that Tuuri shouldn't be there any longer, now that Sigrun didn't want her there any longer if she wanted to keep it together, there wasn't a way of letting her go. There were plenty of reasons not to want Tuuri there any longer.

None of them were good enough.

"No more tears, okay? Sigrun? I-it freaks me out. I didn't think you - not until just now. I made it so obvious from the start, but you - I wondered sometimes, but..."

"Not until just now," Sigrun agreed, quietly. If Tuuri could tell, she wasn't denying it. Not to a dying woman. "At least not like this."

"Then I think - it's time? Look, it started snowing. Eee." Tuuri dropped her blanket, opened the passenger door and slipped from Sigrun's hold, out into the dim day and the falling snow that slid in wet flakes down the rain-spattered windshield. The weather must only just have turned.

Leaving Tuuri alone for a moment, Sigrun went to call the rest of her team.  
  


* * *

  
"... I have supplies enough to keep you hydrated and nourished until the ship arrives, provided our organizers' schedule is reliable," Mikkel's voice drifted down the wind. He stood with Tuuri, some distance away half-hidden by the snowfall, and slowly, clearly, outlined what would happen to Tuuri after the injection. His voice came out flat, but even at a distance Sigrun could hear the effort that kept it that way.

It made nothing better, knowing that Mikkel of all people also hurt from this far more than he'd let on. He just had a way to hide behind his job.

Tuuri had already said her goodbyes to anyone but Mikkel and Sigrun herself. Reynir all but dragged himself back into the tank in a stumbling run, and Sigrun had heard him crying all the way back in. Lalli had taken off into the falling dark after only a few words, and Emil stood staring into the only bright spot on the beach, a tiny driftwood fire that smoked and stank of salt and damp.

Mikkel held up a small glass tube. "... and this is an airway adjunct. I saw no signs of any respiratory aids in the wards that had administered the serum, and we do not have the capacities for anything automated at that, but I expect that, until your condition becomes terminal and your brain functions cease, you will be able to breathe autonomously. All this does is ensure your airways remain open."

"Okay," Tuuri said. "Anything else?"

"What would you like us to do if the serum has lost its viability? You understand that after 90 years it is quite likely for that to happen. If it works as intended, we will keep you alive as long as possible; as you said when we first spoke about this, the letter I discovered in Amalienborg and Reynir's… lady friend… retaining so much of herself through a mental anchor of sorts are a cause for hope - perhaps. But we should be prepared for all eventualities."

Sigrun wanted to stick her fingers in her ears, or throw rocks at Mikkel, or just stride in to tell him to stop his hope talk if there wasn't any. Tuuri didn't have any. She didn't have any. Maybe she'd crush that glass thing into powder or throw it in the sea.

That didn't stop Sigrun from choking up when Tuuri replied.

"Lalli has his puukko, and Grandma's rifle. Sigrun and Emil have their guns, and you have whatever you gave the mother cat. That's enough to kill me five times over. I don't really care, I just don't want it to hurt."

"We can certainly arrange for that." Mikkel cleared his throat and stood awkwardly for a moment. It was Tuuri who hurled herself at him, slamming into his chest for a hug before Mikkel's arms came around her and hid her from view for a moment before letting her go and - Sigrun almost didn't trust her eyes - bowed low. What he said was lost to her in a sudden turning of the wind, but she supposed that was just as well.

When Mikkel stalked past her as Sigrun made her way to Tuuri, she didn't look at his face. The white sand of the beach, the wet upper layer of it, clung to his boots as wet sand did, leaving bright footsteps of dry, powdery stuff, and she didn't look up until she'd reached Tuuri, standing on a spot of churned ground.

"Let's sit by the water," Tuuri said and slipped her hand into Sigrun's. "Mikkel told me he thought I was brave - and he said to not be a pessimist, so I-i want to make my last moments nice. I hoped… I wanted Lalli to be here, and you, but… I don't think he's coming back tonight. He really tried, please don't be mad at him. He said he needed to scout the castle. He can run that far and get back no problem, but not… not before I go to sleep. Mikkel said it's going to be quick because this contains a sedative, and then I won't notice anything until I'm dead. But I can always tell him bye then, so I won't wait before I have to do all the _other_ goodbyes over again." She sniffed, and wiped a hand over the glass plate of her mask, looking irritated for a second before she huffed out a laugh, shrugged and squeezed Sigrun's fingers.

Through both their gloves, Sigrun could feel the heat of her touch. Tuuri was running a fever.

Tuuri sniffed again. "I'm sorry we didn't work this out sooner. I'm sorry we - weren't really that."

Sigrun shook her head. That wasn't a conversation she wanted to have. There wasn't any point to looking back and crying over what maybe could have been. "No. Stop. Forward. Do you think there's a way to get over to your place from Valhalla or Fólkvangr? You're the skaldy type, you should know that sort of thing."

Tuuri sat down in the sand at the water's edge with a huff, and scratched her neck again, the same spot that'd bothered her before. The snowflakes were falling like stars in the firelight. "I don't know. Not how you get there from your afterlife, anyway… only that it's up in the north somewhere, so maybe you could try following the Northern Star. Mages sometimes can get past the guards. I don't know if you can. Besides, I'll be sleeping, that's what you _do_ in Tuonela."

An arm's length ahead of them the sea was rushing over a bank of swept-up pebbles, and ground them together like a murmur of voices. Sigrun shuddered, and sitting down next to her, reached to brush a clump of melting snowflakes from Tuuri's hair. Even at such a light touch, Tuuri tilted her head in.

"Well, that's no good. I'll get there somehow, those guards can't kill me deader than dead. Can I wake you up?"

"I don't know… maybe? If the Swan doesn't get you first. She probably can, and she doesn't like people messing with her bureaucracy, that's what Onni always said. She can get pretty vicious, too. And anyway. You shouldn't be visiting anytime soon. You need to fight trolls on your next missions. Because we found some good things, the Nordic Council's going to like that. I made it sound like that too, I think. In my reports. I'm sure they're going to fund at least one more!"

For a moment, Tuuri's eyes lit up, then a shadow dropped in them like the sun going down behind the clouds, and the spirit went out of her voice. "I'd just like to see it too, I guess."

"Well, if you're sleeping then it won't matter how long it takes before I get to you, and if I take longer, I'll have more to tell you. As long as you aren't surprised if I'm missing a leg or so because a troll ate it, or I've gone all grey and wrinkly. But I can take a swan even when I'm grey and wrinkly, sure thing."

"I don't think you'll make it to grey and wrinkly," Tuuri said, a beat followed in which she said nothing at all, then, in that choked-up, babbly-panicked tone Sigrun knew so well, "I-i'm sorry. That was - I was trying to joke, oh gods…"

"It's okay. We'll still be the prettiest couple there." Sigrun bumped her fist into Tuuri's shoulder and only when she winced she realized it was the injured one. Mikkel had finally mended the torn sleeves, and given everything a good scrubbing; the bloodstains barely still showed unless Sigrun looked for them.

Sigrun dropped her hand.

Tuuri said nothing though she clasped her hand over the wound again. From the corner of her eye she could see Tuuri watch her. Behind them further up the beach Emil's little fire flickered wildly in the wind; its light tipped the rolling waves golden. She was glad, looking up at it, to see he'd gone inside.

"Was it worth it, Fuzzy?" she asked eventually.

"It was _so_ worth it. I got to see more than I ever saw in my life, and I got to be on the… I got to be on the most best team. And I got to have the most best Captain."

Against the lead weight that felt like it was slowly crushing Sigrun's chest from the inside out, she felt the hint of a smile come on.

"You shouldn't be the one comforting me, Fuzzy. Could have said no; I'm not going to forgive myself letting you die no matter what. It's not something a good Captain does."

"Maybe I won't. I don't think I believe that. Or maybe I do, or I'd have picked something quick to go. But maybe I won't, and I'll actually wake up, and then we'll have a miracle and a cure, and there won't be anything to forgive. There isn't anyway. You know how to drive now, and… you kept me safe as long as you could."

"Please… don't. Stop." Sigrun let the sentence hang between them until the pause pitched into silence, helplessly. She couldn't remember, ever, pleading before. The fire flickered. The sea rushed. The pebbles murmured. The wind wrapped around them, blew Sigrun's hair into her eyes. The snow had stopped falling.

Tuuri's mask was misting up from the inside, hiding the view of her mouth and leaving only her dark eyes in a white face, and shadows under them. "You'll stay with me, right? I won't be alone?"

"Not a second." Perhaps on impulse - Sigrun couldn't later say what'd made her do it, only that she didn't want Tuuri to go just like that, with nothing to hold on to - she leaned in and brushed her lips against the cold glass of Tuuri's mask, drew back, waited.

Tuuri touched her fingers to the faceplate. "That… it - It took us long enough to get here. I should get it over with before I make it sad again."

Sigrun didn't ask, and didn't say anything else when Tuuri dug the tiny vial from her pocket to hold it up between two fingers. She rolled her sleeve back, and abruptly jammed the needle into the soft inside of her elbow like her resolve would falter if she did it any other way. Her mouth twitched downward, and she started trembling - whether from the cold, or the serum, or fear, or all of it, Sigrun didn't know, but she gathered Tuuri into her arms anyway.

"Bye," Tuuri said softly, breathing the word out, leaning against Sigrun, and that was all.

Sigrun couldn't find the voice to answer. Her fingers trailed circles through the fuzz of Tuuri's hair at the back of her head, mechanically, tensely.

A few silent moments later, with only the sea murmuring over the pebbles, Tuuri sagged as a warm, empty weight against Sigrun's shoulder, and was gone.

Her chest still rose and fell, but she was gone.  
  


* * *

  
Mikkel was waiting with mugs of tea that had already gone cold when Sigrun trudged into the cockpit with Tuuri asleep in her arms and wrapped her warmly in the blanket. She laid Tuuri on the mattress and loosened the mask after Mikkel gave her a nod; the seal came away with a soft hiss of pressure. Tuuri's nose twitched briefly, before she was still again. Sigrun drained her mug without even tasting its contents, cool against her tongue.

"I don't understand why she kept wearing that thing even when she didn't have to around me," Sigrun said. Just minutes before, it had been all that was between them and a proper goodbye kiss.

"Force of habit, I expect, and perhaps a way of keeping herself and you safe," Mikkel explained while he worked to hang up the bags of fluid and connect them to the back of Tuuri's hand. He gave Sigrun a look that spelled out that he knew exactly what had been between them. _Inadvisable_ , Sigrun thought, would have been the word he'd have used, if he'd used any to say something about it, and Sigrun was sure she'd have punched him then.

Instead Mikkel continued doggedly, "And Reynir, of course, in case any infectious particles made it past the air-seal. She had a point in that regard; we already had to change both their filters once before they wore out from overuse, and even if this serum arrests the Rash, it is impossible to say how infectious she remains. She may become an asymptomatic carrier, and some illnesses can remain in the body for months, even years. It is quite possible that even if she wakes, she must stay in isolation for a prolonged period of time, not to speak of medical tests they will want to run on her."

Up to that point it was soothing, in a strange way, to assist Mikkel, and hand him implements he pointed out - disinfectant wipes to clean the worst of Tuuri's feverish sweat away, a new set of filters for her mask, a thermometer, and things Sigrun couldn't place or name. It was good not to have to think, and lock away the numbness, give her hands something to keep busy.

It'd been the same with the driving. There hadn't been anything left for Sigrun to shout down or kill, but as long as she'd had the tank to look after... it was almost a relief.

"Soooo… you're saying she really is better off dead?"

"No. If that were the case we would lose valuable data Tuuri wanted me to collect. And… regardless of my opinion of this team on a professional level, I have grown quite fond of the individuals that comprise it. If I thought it were a mercy for her to simply die, I would have spared her this ordeal. There is a possibility, however slim, that she may wake, and sometimes even I find trying the more beneficial course of action."

"So how do we tell if her brain stops?"

"It doesn't work like that, Sigrun. But in simple terms - she will stop breathing, and she will no longer react to certain reflexes. There are tests I can perform to tell, but I would rather not jump to conclusions. It is not yet time for any of that. The reports spoke of a gradual development. She has time left. For that I suggest you, as someone she was very... fond of - and Lalli, as a mage from her own culture, who may have some positive effects on her - stay and make her aware of your presence and prevent her slipping away, becoming overwhelmed by whatever mechanism creates these... ghosts. But for the time being I am done here. I feel that we should all get sleep."

"Talk to her? I can do that. I'll stay here. You get sleep."  
  


* * *

  
Sigrun talked through the night, stretched out on the cabin floor, with her head leaning against Tuuri's pillow, resting cheek to cheek to her until a crick wore into Sigrun's neck. She had a lot of stories, and they were good ones, too - hunts, pranks, celebrations, her life before she became a hunter. She talked until at daybreak the telltale _rips-raps_ scratching on the passenger door announced Lalli's return, and she opened to let him in. He was out of breath and swayed with exhaustion, but gave Sigrun a scared look that sent a pang straight to her heart with a reminder of Tuuri before she moved out of the way to let him see his cousin asleep.

She could remember only one other time when she hadn't had words left - that was after the ambush, after her release from hospital when she had had to drag herself on crutches to the families of the soldiers who had died - and then she'd gone for drink after drink until she'd passed out. Now, she didn't have that luxury. Her little mage looked about ready to bolt again, and she pulled him in all the way by the scruff of his collar. He didn't even fight, only collapsed onto the bench in a bundle of twiggy limbs.

"Lalli. Come on. Map."

"Beach," he said with an incredulous look from his bright, overshadowed, sleepless eyes, talking in that half-whisper voice of his, but she couldn't fault him for not speaking up for once. "It's clear." Then he dropped to the floor, and rolled under the bench with only his back visible underneath. He hadn't even bothered to change out of his uniform, or to find himself a spare blanket.

"Okay, beach," Sigrun answered with a sigh.

Tuuri had given her those directions the past evening, something about a wood down to the water that'd tell her where to find the castle-turned-reclamation-outpost. Sigrun decided that the others could do with more rest. She didn't quite feel like company yet, and she missed Tuuri worse than a - she didn't even know what. So she dropped into the driver's seat, turned the tank away from the slowly-lightening sea, and toward the north.  
  


* * *

  
Finding Egebjerggård, the castle-turned-outpost, was easier than Sigrun had expected. Makeshift concrete piers jutted from the beach into the deeper water where larger carrier-type ships might anchor. A row of tanks - some huge, some of them not so much - stood lined up on the road above the beach, and the forest had a broad aisle cut into it that let her spot the fortifications somewhat further inland right away and that their own tank could drive along no problem.

It didn't look much like a castle and rather like a fancy manor farm, but it was all that Torbjörn had promised. It lay far enough outside any of the nearest settlements that they ran no risk of attracting attention from trolls, and in case of passing beasts that might make it onto the grounds, the place was easily defensible. The patched-up buildings weren't just pretty but in pretty good shape, and the bunks did look every bit as comfortable as any military bunk had any right to do and still be called that.

Emil and Reynir raided the storage rooms, Mikkel claimed the infirmary, and when Sigrun made a round inside the metal-and-wire fence, not much different from what they'd seen around Odense Hospital, she almost felt like herself again for a moment. Breathing was easier with her knife in her hand, until she found nothing to kill on the whole perimeter, or in any of the rooms. Neither Lalli (whose footsteps wound in and out of the dusty rooms in a way that reminded her eerily of the Copenhagen palace) nor the cat, both following on her heels, gave any alarm at all, making room for thoughts of Tuuri and the rest of her team, and how she shouldn't care for one over the others, but still, somehow, did.

This was why when feelings happened on any hunting team in Dalsnes, transfers happened. Not that it mattered now that they were safe, and they'd nothing left except waiting for Tuuri to die, to go home, go back to hunting, and move on, at least until the next winter, next mission and next skald-and-driver she'd try her darnedest to stay away from.

It sucked, but what else was there left to do?  
  


* * *

  
"She is recovering, at least in the physical sense," Mikkel said three days later. He'd gotten the generators running and set up a bed for Tuuri in the infirmary, connecting her to monitors and equipment that beeped, rushed and rattled - Icelandic tech, Mikkel explained, that he'd learned how to handle as a medic, and they were lucky that some of it still functioned after all that time.

Lalli hated it, and stayed only ever long enough to perform what magic he had to. Reynir stayed longer sometimes, as long as Mikkel would let him, but he still worked what magic he could in dreams, he said. In the waking world he made Tuuri bouquets - it was winter, and he had no luck finding flowers, but he put together different stalks of yellow grasses and whatever evergreen plants he found on the castle grounds, at other times he'd twist grasses into some rune or another. For being useless garbage, Sigrun thought they looked pretty, and they brightened up the sterile room a little. Emil helped him, sometimes, when he was not hiding out doing whatever with Lalli.

Reynir had also drawn, just in case, another rune that lay in a metal bowl next to Tuuri's head. If it burned, they had an alarm that Lalli would need to lead her to rest. Sigrun hated that bowl, and the scribbled piece of paper in it, and she'd hurled it at the wall in a fit of rage once, hard enough that plaster had come crumbling off. It was a good thing she'd been alone with Tuuri then. No one would talk.

Tuuri looked tiny in the bed they'd put her in, and seemed almost to vanish in the light falling onto the bed from the immense windows on the eastern side of the room that let in the morning. She _was_ tiny, of course, but that was in comparison to Sigrun and Mikkel, not a piece of furniture. The beeping of the instruments - those that still worked - got on her nerves. The place smelled terribly of disinfectant, just as the tank had done.

That she managed to stay put at all through the boredom and the gruelling, gods-forsaken _waiting_ was all due to the figure in the bed and the promise she'd made to keep vigil. When she'd done that in Dalsnes, after unsuccessful hunts and accidents, she'd always been able to go home and rest. In the outpost, she slept draped over the edge of Tuuri's bed that wasn't choked with cables and tubes, or in a chair by her bedside. She left to wash, for mealtimes and runs around the compound when she'd rather shoot herself than sit still, clean and re-assemble her gun, sharpen her knife or do pushups in an empty spot on the floor for the hundred-thousandth time, all while listening to the damn machines beep a hole into her heart.

And she shadowed Mikkel's every step when he showed up.

"How do you mean, recovering?" Sigrun asked.

"The serum works." Something shone behind Mikkel's eyes. "Her fever abated; her body temperature even fell somewhat below normal, but not worryingly so, considering her condition. And not only is the Rash not proceeding, it is healing. See here." He turned Tuuri's head aside, brushing hair from behind her ear.

Sigrun felt the urge to slap his hand away, remembering how she'd discovered the rashed-up patch of skin there. It was almost clear, the worst were a few scabbed-over hives. "Huh. It _does_ look better," she agreed. "So she's healing? She _will_ wake up?"

Something hot and painful rose in her chest; she couldn't afford that, but she had no idea how to shut it out. It wasn't going to be any use, she couldn't afford -

She couldn't help but hope.

Mikkel heaved a heavy sigh and shook his head. "If the serum works as expected, which to all appearances it does, we must expect her to die of the same complications that led the early researchers to abandon the cure."

The heat bloomed outward. "No! No no no no no! No! Not now, I'm _not_ letting her go now!"

"Sigrun, you wore yourself down in just three days; you are not in a position to - "

She twisted Mikkel's hand from her shoulder. "Don't touch me like you care, and you know what? Get your ass moving out of here! You're lucky I'm not throwing you in the sea for some sea beast to eat! You _said_ it was worth trying, and now it's the opposite! You're - you're so fired!"

"Sigrun, please let me expl -"

"OUT!"

To her surprise, Mikkel went without a further word. His face was a thundercloud, and she'd feel sorry for whoever crossed his path next, when her mind would focus on anything other than the blank quiet that came at her and left only Tuuri in the bed her center of attention. It was a little like hunting, with all the details in slow, sharp focus - the shadow of Tuuri's hair poof falling tousled over her forehead, and the way the light ran along her pale eyelashes, the sharp beep of the monitors and the sting of Mikkel's disinfectant in the air, the glint of the IV needle in the back of Tuuri's hand where the bandage had slipped.

Careful not to jostle it further, Sigrun folded her fingers around Tuuri's limp ones. She hadn't really believed there _was_ a cure, but now that it actually worked…

"Come on, Fuzzy, wake up. I know you're listening to me. You'd like it here. You know, they left everything behind, even some of those giant tanks that you liked so much back on base. They're just standing on the beach and rusting like the Danes could just blow their money; our tank looked tiny next to them. It's a pity about ours, really. It was kind of crappy, but it was home, wasn't it? I hope we won't have to leave it behind."

Tuuri gave no reaction that she'd even heard. Sigrun couldn't help peering at her face, her slack mouth and the round cheeks which had gone sunken and pale, with none of the flush that'd always been there when - Sigrun caught herself thinking - she'd been alive. She'd die free of the Rash, but she'd still die. She was as good as dead already. Her mages had tried their damnedest, as far as she could tell, but that hadn't helped either. And worst, she didn't even feel like dressing down anybody.

After Mikkel, the air had just… gone out of her, without her even noticing.

Tired. She felt tired down to her bones.

"But when you wake up - I'll take you on a ride in one of them, how's that? You only have to wake up, come on… there'll be a passenger missing if you don't come. Don't die on me now, Tuuri. I meant what I said about coming to wake you up, and I don't wanna have to do that just yet."

Sigrun took a step back from the bed, glanced at the monitors. Nothing was changing, there was no beep to show that Tuuri had even heard her.

"Okay," Sigrun said. "Later, then. Don't make me fire you, too."  
  


* * *

  
The castle had a perfectly okay mess hall, but Mikkel had decided to set up his gas cooker in the courtyard opposite the infirmary door, near the tank where Sigrun had parked it. If she hadn't known better, they might still be on their mission, instead of standing still and staying silent for sixteen days straight since they'd found the spot. Or, going stir-crazy.

Mikkel still only spoke as little as he could get away with. Even though she'd fired him, he kept cooking for the team and doggedly kept taking care of Tuuri, but Sigrun did her best to make herself invisible for those times. There was an apology sitting on the tip of her tongue, but it died again like she'd personally stabbed it to death every time she went back into the infirmary and saw Tuuri still on her bed.

What was worst - he was right.

It hadn't come at once; first Sigrun had thought that it wasn't coming at all, but like it was sneaking away from them over the past two weeks, Tuuri's brain activity slowly, slowly wound down. And both Reynir and Lalli had confirmed that they could do nothing. In some feat of strength - Sigrun hadn't really understood what both of them were talking about, and she trusted Mikkel's skeptical translation even less - they'd found Tuuri in the dreamworld and tried to purge her spirit of the "cure" now that her Rash was gone, but there as in the waking world she stayed asleep and kept slipping closer to death.

"It is only a matter of time now, Sigrun," Mikkel said that day while they were sitting for dinner in the courtyard in a scatter of snowflakes, and Lalli, Reynir and Emil had gone to watch Tuuri. "You could make this easier on her. I doubt she is suffering, but all you are doing at this point is to keep her alive for your own gratification."

The image to yank off her belts and throw them in Mikkel's face if he knew so much better briefly flashed before her eyes, but she was too tired to follow through. "It isn't gratifying. It's terrible. All I can do is talk or read her that dumb tank manual that Lalli found her!"

"Then why, Sigrun?"

"Because - !" She took a deep breath and set her bowl of watered-down meat stew on the snowy ground before she threw that at him instead. Not even Mikkel should have been able to spoil the canned food they'd found, but somehow he'd managed, and Sigrun ate it only because she needed to keep up her strength. "Because _we failed Tuuri._ And now we have to un-fail her. I'm not going home without my whole team."

"Is that all."

The answer was no. Mikkel knew that as well as she did. "Doesn't matter. It's still our fault she's in there!"

Something painful passed through Mikkel's eyes, and it wasn't until now that Sigrun noticed how terrible he looked, too. If she'd been chafing herself raw trying to be there for Tuuri, then Mikkel had done the same, in a different way. "Sometimes you have to accept the inevitable, Sigrun. People die. Even people that you love."

"Not Tuuri, she _won't_. Sure people die, but you and I, we're not us because we think that's okay. I could be sitting in Dalsnes with my feet up and a ton of kids and knitting sweaters if I thought I wasn't good at fighting back, and if you thought being a medic wasn't worth it you'd be back on your farm washing pigs."

She bumped her fist into Mikkel's shoulder. "Come on, big guy. We'll grab our mages and bring her -"

Before Sigrun had finished her sentence, Emil came hurtling from the infirmary, shouting their names. He plowed to a stop in front of them, and opened his shaking hand. Staining the dark palm of his glove with grey ash, charred from the center outward and crumpled almost past telling, lay Reynir's rune.  
  


* * *

  
Mikkel had switched off the instruments.

"She's still breathing, though." Emil was clutching the rune paper and glancing around like he was expecting for Tuuri's ghost to attack them. "So she isn't dead?"

"That is not how -" Mikkel began, but he fell quiet when Lalli pushed past him to the bed and laid a hand on Tuuri's forehead.

" _Henki_ ," Lalli said. His gaze was fixed on Tuuri, and his eyes were bright and sad with magic.

"Ohh - oh, I know what that is," Reynir interrupted in terrible Swedish that was made even worse by the thick voice and the tears choking him. "We were trying to figure out what - what to do, in the dreamworld. And Lalli told me about the kinds of souls that Finns have; they have three. One's for magic, one's for the person and what she's like, and there's also one that's called _Henki_ ," Reynir explained. Tears were running down his face in fat drops. He stood like a puppet, slumped like someone had cut the strings that held him up. "It's just… it's only breath and heartbeat and everything that keeps the body going. It isn't really life anymore, and anyway, it'll be gone soon now that her self is gone, it just… that's what caused… her self, or that of the people in Copenhagen, that's the ghosts we saw. She isn't _in there_ any longer. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, we tried to save her, we really tried. I'm so useless."

"Then _stop_ being useless!" Sigrun's eyes stung and her head hurt and she felt just as empty as Reynir made Tuuri sound. "If Lalli can lead her to rest like she told me he could, then he can lead her back in there!"

"But - she's asleep. In the dreamworld, I mean."

"Then wake her _up_!"

Reynir recoiled. Sigrun was dimly aware of Lalli moving in on him in between them, both hands on his shoulders and touching their foreheads together - the quickest way for them to communicate in dreams and one of the few times Lalli ever touched anyone - while Emil hooked an arm around her when she took a step toward the mages. What she'd have done… she had no idea, but she let Emil steer her from the room and into the dim, cool air.

Frosted-over snow crunched under her boots and her face stung with cold; Emil's arm was a warm weight around her until she reached her chair and the abandoned dinner spot. The kitten sat licking the broth from Sigrun's discarded bowl, but most of all there was a great silence bearing down on her.

Through it echoed Lalli's distant chanting.  
  


* * *

  
Sigrun fell asleep folded into the driver's seat of the tank reading the manual that she'd still had tucked in her coat pocket until the letters and diagrams blurred before her eyes and her heartbeat and blankness and the smell of old antiseptic were what took their place.

It was funny how she barely thought about Tuuri at all, she thought once, even though she dreamt about her, sitting on the dashboard in clothes that Sigrun had never once seen her wear on the mission; a warm cloak hemmed with downy brown feathers and golden highlights picked out in thread. Sigrun's gaze drew to the wooden clasp at Tuuri's throat - a water bird, perhaps a duck - holding everything together.

Behind her through the windshield was an immense sky of stars, the Northern Star bright and high in between, and the wide, quiet sea below.

"You look good," Sigrun said. Her heart thrummed painfully in her throat. "All dressed up for sleeping until I bust you out?"

Tuuri shook her head. "Lalli and Reynir, they're still trying, a-and I don't want to go yet. I want to take something special with me. I liked how you read to me. You got better at reading aloud after a bit. And I got to dream about giant tanks. That was nice. Hearing you helped me hang on that long."

Sigrun swallowed. It hadn't been enough. "Want me to read to you again? Last time before I burn this thing?"

"I'd like that. That'd be the best way to go."

"Well, come on then, Fuzzy." Sigrun slid from her seat onto Tuuri's mattress that they'd never taken away from the cabin floor, and opened her arms. Tuuri moved into them without hesitation, turning so her head rested at the base of Sigrun's throat and her warm breath was on Sigrun's skin, their bodies snug together. Sigrun pressed a kiss to her hair and hoped that'd say what she hadn't managed to, and wouldn't, now that there wasn't any point at all.

She flipped open the manual.

Sometimes while she read, Sigrun thought Tuuri's form flickered in her hold - dark and shapeless with pinpoint eyes, and then again bright and luminous like a bird with outspread wings, and then Tuuri herself again.

"You got this," she said softly, and Tuuri's eyes opened from their contented dozing; she glanced up at Sigrun, and smiled. And through it all Sigrun continued reading, turning the manual over and starting again when she reached the end, filling the compartment with words and meaningless noises through whatever battle Tuuri was fighting.

It was the bird that won out, eventually, and Tuuri vanished into it.  
  


* * *

  
It wasn't daylight yet when knocking on the driver's-side window woke Sigrun. She picked herself up from the mattress - funny, she could not remember lying down on it - and unlocked the door for a tired-looking Mikkel. Figures were moving across the courtyard behind him.

She didn't ask about Tuuri. She didn't need to hear.

"The ship arrived. I already gave directions; they are going to take all of us into quarantine as agreed-upon, and afterwards we and our organizers are expected to report before the Nordic Council in Reykjavík."

Sigrun nodded through it all, barely listening to what else Mikkel was saying. Watching the men and women bustle about - one of them, with hair like a smooth black helmet around her head - looked like she was trying to squeeze the life out of Reynir by hugging him - was comforting, somehow. It was more life she'd seen since the battle night, and the military air to it reminded her of Dalsnes.

"And then I'm heading home. I'm due some real vacation."

"We all could, I believe. Are you ready?"

"No. But - are they taking the tank?"

"Yes. The circumstances warrant a thorough investigation; we are leaving nothing behind." The way Mikkel's glance went to the infirmary, where the light was on and spilling over the trampled snow in the courtyard, made Sigrun's blood run cold.

"She's still not a _thing_ ," she snarled, and then she was already out of the tank and sprinting toward the door. A thin body slammed into her when she entered, with enough force to knock both of them sprawling onto the tiles.

"Lalli?"

Lalli started to his feet and tugged urgently on Sigrun's hand. "Tanks?" he said with an incredulous, quizzical note in his voice, rubbing his head where he'd fallen. One of the Icelandic soldiers came after him with his arm outstretched, and Lalli darted away with the man in pursuit, taking the explanation with him.

"Tanks?" Sigrun echoed, trying to make sense of the word.

It took a moment until the full weight of the message slammed into her chest, then Sigrun was on her way again so quickly she almost slipped a second time. "She's alive!"  
  


* * *

  
By the time everything but Sigrun's team had been loaded onto the ship, the sun was rising. Its light painted long shadows ahead of them across the snow, toward the sea. Sigrun leaned against the backrest of the gurney and squinted into the sunlight. Tuuri slept in her arms, sometimes making a soft, questioning noise when they rattled over a bump in the ground, and then quieted again without waking fully.

"Can you be a bit more careful?" Sigrun hissed. "She only just survived, I don't want her to wake up and think there's still trolls after us!"

"It's normal for coma patients to wake gradually with their phases of wakefulness being short at first, and it often involves amnesia of some time before they became comatose, so do not count on her to remem-"

"Shut up, Mikkel," Sigrun said. She could feel a smile coming on, and Mikkel wiped a broad hand over his face in order to hide one of his own, or maybe the telltale wet eyes that he tried and failed to blink away. The rest of them didn't look much different; even Lalli was smiling a content little smile.

Her team wheeled Tuuri's gurney across the quay toward the V/S Þór's metal gangplank. Overhead, the signal light in the ship's quarantine airlock jumped from red to green, the door opened with a hiss of pressure, and an announcement in an Icelandic voice winged down to them.

Sigrun couldn't understand a word, and usually it'd have annoyed her, but just then it didn't even matter. What mattered, who mattered, was Tuuri, sitting upright but asleep as a solid weight against Sigrun's shoulder, dreaming through the noise of her rescue.

**Author's Note:**

> If there are moments in here that may seem like shout-outs to A Redtail's Dream, they are that. For the rest of the story I tried my best to make sense of comic canon that we know so far and integrate that with the respective mythologies and medicine. Any errors in that are research fail on my part, and you're welcome to correct me. Finally, though it wasn't consciously written that way, the dream scene owes a lot ot Minutia_R's amazing [The Bird's Path](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9182305).
> 
> Finally, many thanks to both [name redacted] and [name redacted also] for their intrepid help and patience through the writing, betaing and editing. All remaining mistakes are mine.


End file.
